c gordon liddy said:
>
> "Willem" <> wrote in message
> news:...
>>c wrote:
>> ) What would a "recursive acronym" be? I assume that a one-letter
>> solution is
>> ) degenerate.
>>
>> PHP is a recursive acronym, for example.
>> It stands for: Php Hypertext Proprocessor
> I see. Wiki had more examples:
> AMARA - Amara Means A Recursive Acronym
> apsfilter - Apsfilter Prints So Fine, It Leads To Extraordinary Results
> ARIA - ARIA Really Is Awesome (Reference to game)
> CAVE - Cave Automatic Virtual Environment
> Cygnus - Cygnus, Your GNU Support
>
> It would seem to be limited to one step. I think I came up with a
> two-stepper though:
>
> CACA: Caucasians Against Causal Associations. You would think this
> acronym
> unfortunate, but there really is a Chinese American Citizen Alliance. I
> wonder if they know it means poop.
The Jargon File contains a reference to a different kind of two-stepper -
courtesy of a couple of old MIT editors:
EINE - EINE Is Not Emacs
ZWEI - ZWEI Was EINE Initially
Googling for these (in an attempt to get some independent confirmation of
the origin of these names) proved somewhat - um - interesting, since EINE,
ZWEI, and even MIT are of course all legal German words ("one", "two", and
"with"). Also, Germans don't seem to be averse to using the word "editor"
- it may even be the proper German word, for all I know.
But I did find this article, by a guy who seems to know what he's talking
about
:
http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/in.../msg00763.html
--
Richard Heathfield <http://www.cpax.org.uk>
Email: -http://www. +rjh@
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"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29 July 1999